Eight years mayor of Lisbon, eight years prime minister of Portugal: the third political life of Anthony Coast, as president of the European Council, comes a few months after a dramatic step back in the corruption scandal that has engulfed the Portuguese government. Complete with a surreal miscarriage of justice: for a transcript of a telephone wiretap he was put on the grill, but they weren’t talking about him but rather about a man of the same name, a minister in his government. The judiciary admitted the error but the mess was over and Costa had already resigned, proclaiming himself uninvolved in the facts.
A 62-year-old socialist, the son of two writers and of Indian origins, he has had a spectacular political career. Former minister of Antonio Guterres, in 2004 he was the head of the list in the European elections and vice-president of the European Parliament at the beginning of the sixth legislature. He resigned less than a year later to return to the government as minister of José Socrates and then successfully run for the office of mayor of Lisbon. At the helm of the government since November 2015, Costa won an absolute majority in 2022 in a true exception among increasingly fragmented European parliaments. The architect of a prodigious recovery of public finances, while keeping his commitments to implement ‘left-wing’ policies, he led the country out of the surveillance of the troika.
He is also highly respected by other European leaders. After the scandal of November 2023, he was the big winner in the last European elections, and not just morally. The Socialists won one more seat than the candidates of the Democratic Alliance, the party that expresses Prime Minister Luis Montenegro after the March elections. And he has publicly indicated Costa for the European Council, in the team spirit that in Portugal puts the national candidate before the party’s jacket.
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